In a quiet Montmartre alley, tucked between a crêperie and a forgotten bookstore, there was a café that didn’t exist on any map. The sign above the door simply read: Le Hasard Heureux — The Happy Accident.

Amélie Poulain, with her wide eyes and camera in hand, had stumbled upon it while chasing a trail of heart-shaped stones someone had mysteriously laid out across the cobblestones. She pushe...

If victory had a taste,

It would be bold, a flavor not misplaced.

A sip of champagne, crisp and sweet,

A hint of salt from sweat’s defeat.

It lingers like honey, slow and warm,

Born of battles weathered through storm.

A bite of citrus, sharp and bright,

Awakening senses in the pale moonlight.

It’s the crack of bread at a feast of kings,

The nectar that triumph endlessly brings.

But woven withi...

The song grew louder as the days passed. It was always there, whispering at the edges of her awareness. Eve started to hear it in places it couldn’t possibly be: on the static-laden intercom of the subway, in the shuffle of leaves on the sidewalk, in the way her coffee pot gurgled in the morning.

Her sleep suffered. At night, the melody would wrap itself around her dreams, leaving her groggy and ...

Eve didn’t know when the song first appeared in her life. It felt as though it had always been there, a ghostly hum threading through her days. It wasn’t a tune she recognized—no pop song from the radio, no childhood lullaby. Just a strange, mournful melody that clung to her like fog on a winter morning.

At first, she thought it was in her head. She’d hear it in the quiet moments, like when she w...

Neo was walking down a quiet street, lost in thought, when a voice called his name. He turned around, confused. A stranger was running toward him, breathless, eyes darting around as if they were being followed.

“I don’t know who you are. Do you know me?” Neo asked, stepping back cautiously.

The stranger, a young woman dressed in worn-out clothes, grabbed his arm. “Neo, we don’t have time for thi...

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside

your lungs. Look how lighter

the earth is — afterward.

To even write father

is to carve a portion of the day

out of a bomb-bright page.

There’s enough light to drown in

but never enough to enter the bones

& stay. Don’t stay here, he said, my boy

broken by the name...

On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain

which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,

in the dry, steep ravines, the live

mist of the heat is seething like dust

left over from an earlier world.

A crow with a swimmer's shoulders works

the air. And a little bird flies up into a

tree and closes its wings, like a blossom

folded up into a bud again.

In the distance is a very o...

Always that spectral fragment. Filament of line cast back there.

Where open-mouthed fish rise to gulp down shiny lures.

I sang once in an auditorium to almost empty rows.

I looked for my people in the seats, under the seats, behind

the seats, but they weren’t there. I called the three people

who were there to come up and introduce themselves.

They were young aspirants. A

Th...

In the dim light of their cramped studio apartment, Mia tossed a crumpled paper at the wall, missing the trash bin by inches. Alex, sprawled across the worn-out sofa, barely glanced up from their phone.

"I don't think about that," Mia mumbled, more to herself than to Alex, as she contemplated the looming deadline of her art project.

"You don't think about anything," Alex retorted without missing...

At first there's no lake in the city, at first there are only

elevators, at first there are only constricting office desks;

there are small apartments and hamburger joints and

unpaid telephone bills. Then a few nightclubs appear and

eventually the lake disinters. At times there's a highway

and a car and friends in a snowstorm heading nowhere but

back to the city and Sarah Vaughan is singing ...